Loving William Blake for being bonkers

By Sam Leith

12:01AM GMT 01 Dec 2007

How wonderful, and how surpassing strange, that William Blake, who was born 250 years ago this week, should occupy so high a place of honour in the pantheon of our national poets. He was among the oddest poets ever to have lived, and he was certainly the oddest ever to have been any good.

Northrop Frye, a scholar of his work, said something along the lines that no poet comparable in achievement to Blake was so little read. It's not too hard to see why. Most of his work is incomprehensible - the expression of a bewildering private mythology mashed up out of obscure bits of the Old Testament and long-forgotten 18th-century mystics.

Yet look at the generations of worshippers in Anglican churches, public school chapels and rugby stadiums, chests swelling like pigeons and eyes damp, belting out this bizarre, brilliant and almost certainly heretical anthem as if it were an expression of patriotic fervour. Look at those generations of children on speech day, wondering whether to pronounce "symmetry" funny to make it rhyme.

Of many poets is it said, affectionately, that they are mad. But Blake really was close enough to bonkers as made no difference.

He spoke to prophets. He saw - or claimed to have seen - angels roosting in a tree. He charged around in the nude. He worshipped the imagination and deplored earthly authority. He's the patron saint of the misunderstood genius, and the obscurity of his work adds, in this respect, to its attraction. You can make of it what you will. He is cultivated by enthusiasts and eccentrics.

This (along with the Aldous Huxley mescaline link) also has the effect of making him, for some, the intellectual equivalent of a leather jacket and a tattoo. He is, as a colleague so perfectly expressed it, the "art-school smackhead's poet of choice" - the Albion-obsessed Pete Doherty being only the most recent art-school smackhead to embrace him.

When Frye said the work was little read, he wasn't making the point that few people knew Blake: but that his enormous reputation rests on a fragment of his considerable body of work. Pictorially, I guess, that's The Ghost of a Flea, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun (thanks in particular to Thomas Harris), and one of those wonderful monolithic images of Urizen in chains.

Of the poetry, it's Jerusalem (not the long prophetic book; the verse that became the hymn of that title), The Tyger, The Sick Rose, one line from London and one line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

It's a bit as if, say, Milton were known to posterity only for On The Late Massacre In Piedmont, or Ezra Pound for In The Station of The Metro. But the firmness with which those fragments of his work are engraved in the national consciousness is extraordinary.

It's not the case, either, that posterity has somehow cherry-picked the stuff that makes easy sense. There is, it's true, a wonderful simplicity and freshness to the Songs of Innocence and Experience; but even there, their force is a riddling one. They don't seem grounded in the world.

The Sick Rose (and the magical line in it, rhythmically, is the one that everyone forgets when reciting it from memory: "in the howling storm") isn't a real rose; the tiger doesn't stalk through a real forest. When you sing Jerusalem, the answer to all the questions in the first verse is "no"; and what it would mean to build Jerusalem here is entirely unclear - the battle will be fought with "arrows of desire", and it's safe to say the new city won't involve bricks and mortar.

His better known lines, too, are not as straightforward as they seem. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." You can see roughly what he's getting at there, but only roughly. "Mind-forg'd manacles" makes sense, but what did he mean by "pity divides the soul"? I have been puzzling over that since my teens. Is a divided soul a bad thing?

If you get Blake, mind, you really get Blake. He often doesn't so much influence as possess leading poets into luminous dead ends. Practically nothing Allen Ginsberg wrote could have been written without Blake. Brian Patten called Stevie Smith "Blake's purest daughter" - and there is indeed something distinctly Blakean in her weird work. Michael Horovitz, a long-time poetry pusher, is probably the most conscious Blakean of those still among us (his decade-in-the-making New Waste Land is a mash-up of poetry and politics and prophecy).

So, like I say, surpassing strange. He was neither the founder of a recognisable poetic school, the promulgator of any shared creed, or the poet of an Albion that existed anywhere outside his own imagination. His work was an exuberant, visionary, marvellously powerful trumpet-blast for the imaginative freedom to be, well, as odd as William Blake. And England, second maybe only to Shakespeare, took him to its bosom.